Exhibitors, attendees, and speakers at last week’s Shop.org Annual Summit were encouraged and excited about the future of ecommerce, both in terms of growth and technology.
In fact, walking around the convention center at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas seemed to make everyone feel like the industry was on the cusp of rapid change, revenue growth, and even greater consumer acceptance.
Highly relevant wine and gift recommendations drive nearly 10% of all site sales and deliver a 15% increase in average order value for #1 online wine retailer
Las Vegas – September 22, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, today announced that Wine.com is using the enRICH™ personalization platform to create an online experience that both mimics and surpasses the experience of choosing a bottle at a local specialty wine store. Through enRICH, the nation’s #1 online wine retailer now delivers highly relevant personalized recommendations of varietals, vintages and related accessories throughout the Wine.com site. Recommendations are tailored to each shopper’s current browsing behavior and geographical location and incorporate the point of view of the Wine.com community – what they looked at, how they shop, what they buy – in order to expose shoppers to relevant products that they might not have considered otherwise.
“We offer a huge assortment of wines to an extremely diverse customer base of wine lovers who could be looking to restock their cellar, buy a statement gift, pick an inexpensive party wine, or just find something that they love to drink,” said Amy Kennedy, Vice-President of Marketing at Wine.com. “The idea of personalization has always been attractive to us but difficult to realize in our market. RichRelevance helps solve this problem and delivers an unmatched customer experience. With recommendations already driving a 15% increase in average order value on Wine.com – and as much as a 26% increase in recent weeks – we’re very pleased with the results of personalization.”
Wine.com implemented RichRecs™ from RichRelevance in under six weeks to deliver a more relevant customer experience by offering personalized product recommendations on product, category, home and search pages. RichRecs leverages multiple recommendation approaches including collaborative filtering, personalization, analysis of current and past individual and “crowd” shopping behaviors, cross-placement optimization and a closed feedback loop to deliver the most relevant recommendations for each shopper at every moment. Automatic “competition” among 40+ recommendation types ensures accuracy and immediacy in the product recommendations.
As a result, no two shoppers at Wine.com are recommended the same products – even when considering the same bottle of wine. Both recommendation types (such as “people who bought this also bought…”) and recommended products constantly evolve and adapt to provide a targeted and unique customer experience.
“RichRelevance provides an intelligent technology that can assess multiple inputs – including geographical availability and pricing – to deliver an engaging shopping experience,” Kennedy continued. “Even better, their team took the time to understand our business and our goals. We expect the partnership to deepen as we look to integrate more of their personalization products across our customer lifecycle.”
“Wine.com is on the forefront of using data and technology to provide shoppers with an online experience that parallels if not surpasses the offline experience,” said David Selinger, CEO of RichRelevance. “With personalized recommendations, customers can immediately find products that they love but would have never discovered on their own. In the case of Wine.com, these are varietals they would have never encountered at a local wine store with a restricted inventory and no means to optimize data on behaviors and preferences. As the online experience continues to evolve, it’s companies like Wine.com – who harness the power of personalization to drive sales and loyalty – that will emerge as real ecommerce leaders.”
About Wine.com
Wine.com is the nation’s #1 online wine retailer, according to Internet Retailer magazine’s annual ranking of websites by revenue, offering thousands of wines, wine gifts, gift baskets and monthly wine clubs. Wine.com’s mission is to be the ultimate resource for wine enthusiasts, whether shopping for themselves or sending a gift, by offering a great selection, low prices, convenient delivery and helpful information. Wine.com is the world’s most visited wine web site, according to research conducted by comScore Media Metrix. For more information, visit http://www.wine.com.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance is the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, including Sears.com, BassPro.com and Walmart.com. The company’s suite of SaaS-based offerings, including RichRecs™, RichMail™, and MyRecs™, are easily integrated and drive a range of key performance indicators by enhancing the entire shopping lifecycle, from interception through engagement to re-interception. Built on the enRICH™ platform, RichRelevance products offer robust merchandiser control and employ over 40 different recommendation types with cross-placement optimization and a closed-feedback loop to display relevant, clearly-explained product recommendations. Founded and led by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco.
Exclusive event will connect marketing and analytics professionals in an open dialogue on the opportunities and challenges facing their organizations and the industry
San Francisco – September 21, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, in partnership with Endeca, the search applications company, today announced the first Ecommerce Analytics Roundtable at the W Hotel in San Francisco on September 30, 2009. The roundtable is designed to generate an open dialogue among marketing and analytics peers on the specific opportunities and challenges they face as pioneers in online commerce.
The event will feature a keynote from Paco Underhill, founder and CEO of Envirosell and author of the best-selling book, “Why We Buy,” immediately followed by an open discussion of key topics ranging from managing executive expectations through addressing the disconnect between online and offline analytics.
Retailers have amassed enormous amounts of data on shopping behavior that can be used to drive business decisions,” said Underhill. “Now the time has come to shift away from focusing on strategy to recognizing the tactics that drive sales, loyalty and satisfaction. I commend RichRelevance and Endeca for presenting a forum to facilitate the exchange of the specific tactics that underpin the success of the world’s largest retailers.”
Participation in the inaugural Ecommerce Analytics Roundtable is limited to 30 business professionals who are senior members of their company’s marketing and analytics team. For practitioners outside of the Bay Area, RichRelevance is planning a series of quarterly Ecommerce Analytics Roundtables across the country. For more information or to register for the September 30 event, please visit https://richrelevance.com/analyticsroundtable/savethedate.
“The Ecommerce Analytics Roundtable is a forum for marketing and analytics professionals to talk about the realities of their jobs, the expectations that they face, and the innovations that help them succeed,” said RichRelevance Founder and CEO, David Selinger. “We’re very excited to provide a place where these conversations can take root and grow into a larger body of knowledge. Paco’s insights provide a great starting point for discussion, and we anticipate a memorable event for all involved.”
“We appreciate the unique opportunity to convene a renowned industry thought leader such as Paco Underhill, with marketing and analytics experts from the front lines of e-commerce,” said John Andrews, Vice President, Solutions Marketing & Product Management, Endeca. “We expect this forum to generate many innovative ideas for shaping the customer experience and managing the demands of this holiday season.”
About RichRelevance RichRelevance is the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, including Sears.com, BassPro.com and Walmart.com. The company’s suite of SaaS-based offerings, including RichRecs™, RichMail™, and MyRecs™, are easily integrated and drive a range of key performance indicators by enhancing the entire shopping lifecycle, from interception through engagement to re-interception. Built on the enRICH™ platform, RichRelevance products offer robust merchandiser control and employ over 40 different recommendation types with cross-placement optimization and a closed-feedback loop to display relevant, clearly-explained product recommendations. Founded and led by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco.
About Endeca Endeca is a leading provider of search applications. Search applications built on Endeca’s technology deliver the clearest visibility into information, driving hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings and increased revenue for our customers. Powering these solutions is Endeca’s Information Access Platform, a major enterprise search innovation based on a fundamentally new architecture for building high-ROI applications that let users access any data from anywhere any way they need it. With this improved information visibility, customers make better choices, and employees better decisions. More than 250 million end users around the world access information through Endeca solutions, which are in use at more than 600 leading organizations including: ABN AMRO, Boeing, Cox Newspapers, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Dell, Ford Motor Company, Hyatt, IBM, John Deere, the Library of Congress, Texas Instruments, and Walmart.com.
About Envirosell Envirosell is the premier consumer behavior research and consulting agency for commercial environments, integrating analysis of layout, merchandising and operations. Envirosell has 25 years of experience conducting in-store research for major consumer product manufacturers, retailers, banks, restaurants and design agencies, with a client list that includes almost half of the Fortune 500 list.
by Darren Vengroff
Netflix created the $1 million Netflix Prize in 2006 as a way to reward developers of a next-generation film-rating prediction algorithm.
The idea sounded seductively simple: If developers could predict how users would rate a film, they could use that prediction to decide whether it makes sense to recommend the film to them or not.
A new product recommendation feature on Wine.com is helping drive up average order values by 26%, Wine.com Inc. CEO Rich Bergsund says.
Search for red Bordeaux wines on Wine.com, for example, and columns on the left and right sides of the landing page will recommend lists of related wines-but no two shoppers will see the same lists, Bergsund says. The underlying recommendation engine is from richrelevance Inc.
CIO magazine award profile acknowledges RichRelevance’s use of SSD drives within cloud computing network to accelerate performance and algorithm sophistication
San Francisco – September 1, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, today announced that it has received a 2009 Intel Premier IT Knowledge Award. The Award heralds RichRelevance’s unique innovations in addressing the IT challenges faced by enterprise-class online retailers, specifically through the enablement of previously impossible algorithm development.
RichRelevance currently serves more than 200 million personalized product recommendations per day for such retailers as Sears, Kmart and Burton on its enterprise SaaS infrastructure—maintaining 100% uptime even during the busiest shopping days of the year. The company has now slashed response times to an average of under 25 milliseconds using solid-state drives (SSDs), enhancing an already unparalleled geographically distributed infrastructure.
Most personalization providers rely on just one data center, which can cause a delay of up to 800 milliseconds in response time. RichRelevance has invested in six distributed data centers, where the deployment of SSDs ensures that 99.99% of response times are under 100 milliseconds across all partners—for even the world’s largest retailers. The resulting increases in speed and relevance of personalized recommendations safeguard key competitive advantages for both RichRelevance and its enterprise-class retail clients. A recent Amazon study found that page-load speed provides not just a better shopping experience, but is directly tied to the retail bottom line: every 100 milliseconds of delay cost the company 1% in sales (Kohavi & Longbotham 2007).
The introduction of SSDs was led by Elya Kurktchi, architect of Akamai, Hotmail and Qualcomm’s infrastructures. “Intel’s SSD technology gives our already advanced infrastructure an additional edge, enabling us to accelerate the complexity of the algorithms and computation models we employ without sacrificing performance,” explains Kurktchi. “SSDs allow us to further exploit our core technology’s full potential through the nearly limitless number of computations we can conduct simultaneously.”
“Enterprise-class retailers choose to partner with RichRelevance based on the strength of our technology and our team’s unmatched experience in e-commerce, merchandising, personalization and data analysis,” said RichRelevance CEO David Selinger. “Our success as the preferred personalization provider for two of the largest US retailers is founded upon industry experts like Elya, whose sole focus is to deliver best-in-class results for our clients.”
The Intel Premier IT Knowledge Awards program was designed to recognize and reward North American IT managers / groups who have generated best practices, driving business value and innovation. RichRelevance was chosen by the Intel Premier IT Professionals community from among eight award finalists to receive the award in the Professionals Choice category. Additional information on the awards and RichRelevance’s SSD initiative is available at http://ipip.intel.com/go/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2009/08/intel_premier_it_awards.pdf.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance is the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, including Sears.com and Walmart.com. The company’s suite of SaaS-based offerings, including RichRecs™, RichMail™, and MyRecs™, are easily integrated and drive a range of key performance indicators by enhancing the entire shopping lifecycle, from interception through engagement to re-interception. Built on the enRICH™ platform, RichRelevance products offer robust merchandiser control and employ over 40 different recommendation types with cross-placement optimization and a closed-feedback loop to display relevant, clearly-explained product recommendations. Founded and led by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco.